Getting started - making better use of the available screen space, and getting Pidgin and Firefox ready

OK, everything's installed and the computer's up and running. The boot time's not amazing - some time soon I shall time it and see how long it takes - but it's not really a bother. All that wait will give me time to make a cup of tea!

The first thing I want to do is get the desktop looking the way I want it to. Desktop wallpaper and other cosmetic changes can wait a little while - there are more fundamental things to be changing first, starting with toning down the special effects to something more appropriate for an old computer like this.

• System >> Preferences >> Appearance >> Visual Effects >> None
  While this computer seems capable of managing with Visual Effects set to 'Normal', this really slows it down. Setting Visual Effects to 'None' instead seems to improve the system's speed significantly. Besides which, I often don't have time for visual effects. Even if they don't noticeably slow a system down, their effect for me is to make the system feel as though it is being slowed down, which is perhaps as bad as if it is actually slowed down. Fancy graphics - don't do them, kids!
• Applications >> Add/Remove
  Set the software installer to show All available applications and install Microsoft Core Fonts. Like it or not, these typefaces appear to be used near ubiquitously, and the web looks better if they're available for use.
  
• System >> Preferences >> Appeareance >> Fonts
  Change settings to Subpixel smoothing and all fonts to size 8. Subpixel smoothing makes the display look a bit better on the TFT display, and setting all of the fonts to size 8 frees a bit of screen space as well as, in my view, making Ubuntu look better in general. Set Arial as the application and desktop fonts, and Arial Bold as the window title font, which again creates a bit more screen space and makes things look more orderly, as Arial's much narrower than Ubuntu's default setting of Sans.

There. That's much nicer. Now I want to be able to chat with my friends, so I'll configure Pidgin, the IM program provided in a default Ubuntu installation.

• Gnome Panel
  Delete the shortcuts to Help and Evolution, and add a shortcut to Pidgin. Move Pidgin shortcut in front of the Firefox shortcut. Move the shortcuts to the left to take advantage of the space freed up by setting the fonts as Arial!
• Run Pidgin
  Set up the accounts I use. Right-click the Pidgin icon in the system tray (or whatever it's called in Gnome - I mean the icon up in the top right that has a green circle overlaying a speech bubble) and set Blink on New Message. Right-click the icon again and go to Preferences. Set the font smaller, set sounds volume to loudest, and turn off logging. One last time, right-click the icon, go to Plugins, and select Message Notification. That should be Pidgin set up to do the job - the default settings don't make received messages prominent enough for my liking, and it's easy to miss friends' messages. I need such things to flash and make loud noises at me, else I stand little chance of noticing them.

Job done. Firefox is the default browser installed with Ubuntu. On my Windows computer I use Opera in preference to Firefox, but because Firefox is installed by default with Ubuntu and 'does the job', I'll stick with it. To make it work as I like it to, though, a few things need tweaking.

• Run Firefox and navigate to about:config.
  Search for 'tab' and set browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 10 or 15 (100 is annoyingly large, especially at this screen resolution), and set browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3 (this moves the close button to the very right of the tab bar, again saving some screen space).
  Search for 'backspace' and set browser.backspace_action to 0 (this will make backspace work like the back button, and shift+backspace work like the forward button).
  Search for 'google' and change all instances of 'google.com' to 'google.co.uk' - Ubuntu's not as internationalised as it would like to think it is; I'm sure this bit's is done for me on my Windows XP installation of Firefox.
  Next, close the about:config tab and click on the drop-down for the search bar. Select Manage Search Engines..., and add the keywords 'g' to Google and 'w' to Wikipedia. Remove all other searches (I never use them anyway!), and add the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary. Give it a suitable keyword, such as 'dict'.
  Right-click on the menu bar and select Customise. Tick Use Small Icons and then drag all of the navigation icons up to the menu bar. Click Done, then right-click again and tell Firefox that you don't want to see the Navigation Toolbar. Voila: more screen space!
  This completes the tinkering with Firefox.